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Comment on Brazil (Pt 2)

I apologize for not writing much lately, but I am working 12-hour days, and sometimes I am too tired to even turn on the computer.

The UK Guardian has an articleabout the coup in Brazil that is surprisingly good, given that the Guardian is normally right-wing.

Brazil shows that the peasants remain peasants because they think and act like a mob. More on this below.

Brazil’s dominant broadcast and print outlets are owned by a handful of Brazil’s richest families, and are radically neoliberal. For decades, the oligarchs have used those media outlets to defend their wealth, and to defend Brazil’s inequality.

Indeed, most of today’s corporate media outlets in Brazil supported the 1964 military coup that ushered in two decades of elitist dictatorship.

Globo (Brazil’s largest and most influential media outlet,) spent 30 years cheering the 1964 coup and oligarchy that followed. The Latin American media outlets are so oligarchical and corrupt that the US corporate press seems professional and ethical in comparison.

Unfortunately in Brazil, as everywhere else, middle class people think exactly what the upper class wants them to think. The programming is done by the corporate media outlets, which are owned by the rich.

It has now become clear that corruption is not the cause of the effort to oust Brazil’s twice-elected president; rather, corruption is merely the pretext.

Yes, the corrupt ones are Rousseff’s accusers.

Rousseff’s moderately leftwing Workers’ Party first gained the presidency in 2002, when her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won a resounding victory. Due largely to his popularity and charisma, and bolstered by Brazil’s booming economic growth under his presidency, the PT has won four straight presidential elections – including Rousseff’s 2010 election victory and then, just 18 months ago, her re-election with 54 million votes.

The rich allowed the Workers’ Party to hold seats in Brazil’s government, because rich people tripled their fortunes when there was a high global demand for Brazil’s raw materials. Now that demand is down, Brazil is in a severe recession. Rich people (and corrupt politicians) are using the recession as a pretext to get rid of Rousseff and the Workers’ Party.

Brazil’s elite class and their media organs have repeatedly failed to defeat the Workers’ Party at the ballot box. What they have been unable to achieve democratically, they are now working to achieve anti-democratically: by having a bizarre mix of politicians – evangelical extremists, far-right supporters of a return to military rule, non-ideological backroom operatives – simply remove Rousseff from office.

Those leading the campaign for Rousseff’s impeachment and who are in line to take over – most notably the house speaker Eduardo Cunha – are far more implicated in scandals of personal corruption than is Rousseff. Cunha falsely told Congress that he had any foreign bank accounts, and then was caught last year with millions of dollars in bribes in secret Swiss bank accounts. Cunha also appears in the Panama Papers, working to stash his ill-gotten millions offshore to avoid detection and tax liability.

This is another reason for the coup against Rousseff. So many politicians are embroiled in corruption charges that their goal is to get rid of Rousseff and replace her with someone who will make all the corruption charges vanish.

Words cannot describe how surreal it was to watch the vote to send Rousseff’s impeachment to the Senate, during which one corrupt member of Congress after the next stood to address Cunha, proclaiming with a straight face that they were voting to remove Rousseff due to their anger over corruption. (!!!)

Some examples of people who voted to impeach:

Paulo Maluf, who is on Interpol’s red list for conspiracy.

Nilton Capixaba, who is accused of money laundering.

“For the love of God, yes!” declared Silas Camara, who is under investigation for forging documents and misappropriating public funds.

Eduardo Cunha, Speaker of the House and third in line to the presidency. He’s the one who spearheaded the impeachment proceedings even though he got caught last year squirreling away millions of dollars in bribes in Swiss bank accounts, after he lied to Congress and told them he had nomoney in foreign accounts.

A New York Times article last week reported that “60% of Brazil’s Congress” (i.e. 357 politicians) who are voting to impeach Rousseff “face serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, illegal deforestation, kidnapping and homicide”. By contrast, Rousseff “is something of a rarity among Brazil’s major political figures: she has not been accused of stealing for herself.”

Prominent rightwing congressman Jair Bolsonaro – a rich oligarch who is widely expected to run for president — said he was casting his vote to impeach Rousseff in honor of a human-rights-abusing colonel in Brazil’s military dictatorship who was personally responsible for Rousseff’s torture. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, proudly cast his vote to impeach in honor of “the military men of ’64” – the ones who led the 1964 elitist coup.

Many people – including the prosecutors and investigators who have led the corruption probe – think the real plan behind Rousseff’s impeachment is to end to the ongoing investigation, thus protecting corruption, not punishing it. Once Rousseff is impeached, Brazil’s media will turn public attention away from corruption, and the newly empowered faction in Brasilia will be able to protect themselves.

Middle class Brazilians are unhappy about the recession, and about political corruption. Their anger is fanned by the corporate media outlets, which direct public anger at Rousseff, who is one of the least corrupt of them all. As always the public follows like sheep to the slaughterhouse.

The elitists want to install Vice President Michel Temer as the new President. Mr. Temer is a flaming neoliberal who is under scrutiny because of a colossal graft scandal. A high court justice ruled that Congress should consider impeachment proceedings against Temer. He is so hated by the public that one recent poll found that only two percent of Brazilians would vote for him. Nonetheless Mr. Temer will automatically take power next month if the Senate decides to put President Rousseff on trial.

The middle class hates Rousseff, but they hate Temer even more. Because they obey the media outlets regarding Rousseff, they will get Temer whether they like it or not. The public is calling for elections, but Temer condemnsthese calls for democracy as a “coup” against him.

Once again we see that the price of mass stupidity is mass enslavement.

Impeachment just exchanges one band of thieves for another, giving the second band a chance to cover-up their crimes.

Q. Why does this keep happening?

A. Mob mentality

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This is not related to anything above, but at left is one of the villains of the original Star Wars series. At right is the new Star Wars villain. I changed nothing in these images. Hollywood has become utterly pathetic.